195.6 OHV head cracks

They typically crack in an exhaust port, and it's not always visible.

I have an NOS one I'll never use. I might even be able to deliver it to Ohio sometime this year.

Metoo -- around the exhaust valves, the hottest part of the head, but up in the water jacket over the combustion chamber. That's what I saw when I sliced up that head with six cracks. From cooling system woes and poor maintenance.

We have problems with cracked heads in my Ford 2.3 World (the Pinto engine). That said we just run them. I have one with a crack right through the exhaust seat. There is no coolant lose and the crack seems to fill up with deposits. Compression is good.

 There are some higher prices block sealants ($50+) on the market. I have no idea how good they are but if the head were removed, the passages critically cleaned and the sealant filled directly into the head (as opposed to the intended use of adding to the coolant in a running engine) I wonder if the results would be improved?

I ran a cracked 195.6 head on the street for three years as a daily driver. I didn't know it was cracked at the time though. It was my first OHV car. I was stationed in dry Idaho, Mountain Home AFB. So it lost about a quart of coolant every 6-8 weeks, and I never could find the leak! I just figured it was evaporating between the dry climate and engine heat. Had a slight miss at idle that moved, wasn't a single cylinder, and wasn't enough to affect running. I attributed it to a worn distributor, but not bad enough to worry about replacing. Discovered it had been cracked all along when making a cross country trip from Mtn. Home AFB to South Carolina (taking car to my dad's while I went on to Okinawa, Japan for a couple years). I was pulling a utility trailer and driving about 12 hours (on the road 12 -- 14-15 hour days). On the morning of the third day I checked and filled the radiator. Started blowing water out about 15 minutes down the road. "Must have over filled it". Let it cool down and refilled, being careful to leave enough room in the top of the tank this time. Same thing -- 15 minutes and it spat water out! As soon as it got up to engine temp the cracks opened up and leaked compression into the water jacket. Surprisingly it was running just fine though. Let it cool and got it to a small country garage (I was in BFE, Kansas).  I was a 25 year old kid at the time. Told the 40+ year old mechanic that I hadn't run it hot, but he was skeptical. Told me he didn't have time to mess with it but if I wanted to use some tools and pull the head he'd look at it. I did. He was as surprised as I was to actually SEE cracks radiating out from the valve seats -- both IIRC, but may have just been exhaust. He told me he thought I'd just run it hot and blew a head gasket or cracked it, but there was no way I could have run it hot enough to do that, it had to have had cracks in it all along and the long hours of driving while pulling the trailer too was just too much for it. I'd driven from Mtn. Home AFB to Denver and to Seattle over the three years I had the car there, but not pulling a trailer or running hard! Had a hard time convincing a local U-Haul rental to take my dad's credit card over the phone (I only had a low limit card) to rent a truck and dolly to finish the trip. Even though the engine got a good dose of water in it I got another head and ran it a good many more years before finally rebuilding. I did pull the pan and check the bearings before putting a rebuilt head on though -- no discernible damage.